If you are looking at the picture, I was at the Colorado River, where I had a jet ski boat and vacation house trailer for 25 years. That's a Motorola HT-200 450 MHz Handy-Talkie in my left hand and a Coors beer in my right hand.

I've been licenced since 1958. For many years I was K6MQG and spent most of my time DXing on 20 meters. In 1967, I married Elaine WB6KVG and moved away from my monoband Yagi. Over the years, we put up little tribanders in various QTHs and kept chasing DX. Just before the big Laguna Beach fire in 1993, I took down my last HF Yagi, went virtually inactive on HF and just used 450 MHz on the Cactus Radio System.

In 2008 I had some spare time on a business trip to Rome, so I put a wire out my hotel window and listened to the CQ WW 160 CW contest on a little shortwave radio. That made the juices start to flow again. Soon after that, two Cactus Radio friends landed on Ducie Island with a big DXpedition team (VP6DX). I pulled my radio out of the closet, threw up a little inverted Vee and worked them on 10 through 80.

I have been very active, but have only had a vertical on 10 through 80 at the Laguna Beach house. When I went off the DX hunt, I only needed one country (ZA). When I got back on, I needed 17 "entities" and now that number is four. If you count deleted countries, my current DXCC total is 372 and DXCC Challenge is 2131 (none deleted). I hope to get some F2 openings on 6 meters to get that Challenge number higher. I finally put up an IAC "Double Bazooka" Inverted L on 160 and my first QSO with it was K1N in Navassa (Challenge #2000) at sunset dusk on February 9, 2015. The Inv L seems to hear and transmit quite well. I was able to work VR2XAN with it at sunrise recently and have been working Europeans at their sunrise.

Until recently, the setup here in Prescott, AZ has been a K3, Tokyo Hy-Power HL-1.5KFX and a 5 element LFA Yagi on 6 feet over the roof. The LFA was replaced by a DX-70 tower and a SteppIR DB-36 on January 24, 2015. It rocks, what a difference after suffering with verticals for a couple of decades. The new antenna here in Prescott is shown below.

The picture below shows what was my Laguna Beach shot to the Pacific and long path into Europe and the Middle East. The antenna was effectively 725 feet up in that direction as well as to the north.

My wife (WB6KVG) and I have pretty much transitioned over to our house in Prescott AZ (hence the address shown above).